Another Guy's Victory
by Sirhith
Summary: UPDATE: Rory's side of things. Jess is tired of being mad at Rory, and it took getting soaked with a sprinkler to figure that out.
1. Jess

He opens the door to Luke's apartment and nudges it the rest of the way open with a soggy shoe.

Luke looks him up and down from his spot on the edge of the bed, where he's messing with his alarm clock. "I hope Kate Winslet made it out okay."

"What?" His head is buzzing with the damp tendrils of hair stuck to Rory's face and her restrained, polite little responses (God, he missed those). He's trying to estimate how long Dean will spend crouched in the sprinkler spray-if Rory will take pity on him and help, or if she'll let him keep his dignity along with getting soaked. Or maybe Dean has the brute strength that gets it fixed in a second.

"Too bad about DiCaprio, though."

"Huh?"

"Ya look like you're fresh off the... nevermind." Luke waves the bit away with the screwdriver in his hand. "So why're you trackin' water all over the place?"

Jess feels his shoes squelch as he shifts his weight. "Reasons. Fixing a sprinkler."

"Ah. Well Shane's lookin' for ya."

"Whatever." He rubs the tracks of water on his forearms off on his sweater, like it's not already waterlogged.

"I told her you were out, but she camped at a table for a while anyway. I think I saw her put on her lip stuff about four times." Luke digs into the inner workings of the clock with his finger, like this, not makeup, is the only way anyone should spend their free time.

"I'm gonna take a shower."

"Yeah, sure, that makes sense." Luke shakes his head and gives the clock another look, but turns in time to catch him with his hand on the bathroom doorknob. "If she comes back I'll tell her you'll be down in a bit, or...?"

Jess shuts the door and wrenches an arm out of his sweater, then the t-shirt, the collar of which stretches and pops a seam. They're probably making out right now, in the arc of the sprinklers like some Disney couple. No, Rory would hate that. She mentioned once that standing in wet clothes makes her feel trapped, like she's suffocating. Something about a water balloon fight gone wrong when she and Lane were kids. But while he'd stood drenched in that guy's yard, he was so distracted thinking about her damp skin under her school sweater that he couldn't blame Dean if he got there and couldn't keep his hands off her.

He steps into the shower and turns it on, not bothering with soap or shampoo. He spends so many hours showboating with Shane, making it look as PG-13 as possible, and he hadn't expected to have to do it this long. There's a limit on the fun to be had in a potential health code violation. Kissing Shane, talking to Shane, looking at the bridge of her nose to avoid committing her eye color to memory on accident-it's exhausting. It takes monumental effort to listen to her talk about Usher's six-pack all day, which is an impulse he thought most girls with a regular makeout partner would try to curb. And he's known all that on some level for a while now, but seeing Rory today made it obvious.

In the second before her pager went off he'd wanted to say, "I miss you," and "I'm sorry," and any thousand other hokey Hallmark sentiments (hokey, but still true) that would get her to stay for five more minutes. He may not have said any of those things, but he doesn't get why she can't see how much he wants to.

He would run twice as many blocks to fix double the sprinklers for her, and sacrifice his paperbacks to the spray, and do the right thing and re-break everything so her boyfriend could get a chivalrous victory. Every time. Always. It doesn't matter but maybe it does.

He gets out and ties on a towel. What happened at the wedding wasn't a fluke. He'll die if it was. If Dean wasn't a factor Rory would be the one sitting through four rounds of lip gloss just so he could go down there and ruin it all. Still, the day he sees Rory with a compact mirror he'll read Faulkner to her until she comes to her senses.

So no lip gloss maybe, but the waiting part he can picture. He's seen her lots of ways: balancing a fork in one hand and a textbook across her knees, rushing off to go make sure Dean's not mad about something, distracted enough by Lorelai that he can glance at the curve of her cheeks while he stacks dirty dishes at the counter. At least one of those Rorys has to be missing him, too.

He figures he'll brush his teeth now, since he can still hear Luke rattling around and swearing under his breath. While he puts toothpaste on his brush he thinks about running those little braids of hers under his thumb like cards in a deck. Taking her to bookstores and letting her lead him through the aisles by his watchband. Kissing her for longer than one miraculous moment, feeling her delicate hums of delight reverberate in his mouth, making it so much better for her than it ever was with Dean.

He spits and rinses, and then he runs the hair dryer, because Shane hasn't shut up about the upside-down Spider-Man kiss in weeks. The last thing she needs is encouragement.


	2. Rory

"Rory? Whoa, you weren't kidding. This is insane." Dean shields his face from the sprinkler as he comes up the sidewalk, but she sees him grinning under his elbow.

"Okay, this isn't funny. Can you just fix it, please?"

He puts his arm down and takes in the sight of her. "You look cute. I just wanna wrap you in a towel." His t-shirt is already plastered to his chest.

"Dean!"

"Okay, sorry." He picks up the handle and turns it, but she can tell it's loose. "Huh," he grunts. "It's not... gripping right."

The words stick in her throat. "I think you have to push down and twist. That's what the guy said."

"Hmm." He tries again. The water dies. "Whaddya know. That wasn't so bad." He slicks his bangs back.

"Thanks." She runs a hand through her rippling ponytail for something to do.

"Hey, are you okay? Your face is all red."

"I'm fine."

This is fine. This is how it's supposed to go. When you have a problem, you call your boyfriend. It's in the Girlfriend Handbook. And you shouldn't feel guilty when your not-boyfriend, your not-anything, really, fixes it first out of his own free will. It's also not your fault if your face gets flushed when your not-anything does his "Mr. Darcy emerging from the lake" act, and again when you think back on it while your boyfriend is standing there.

Kissing Dean was like watching _I Love Lucy_ reruns: nice, but she knew all the spots where the laugh track came in. And he was respectful and kept his hands where she told him to, and after a certain length of time they broke apart and he went home and she went upstairs to bed and that was that.

But kissing Jess that one time felt like it had almost a whole year inside of it, all of his unique marks on her life: his cramped handwriting in her copy of _Howl,_ her dinky basket from the auction that he insisted on keeping _,_ and her smashed-up car that, had it not been towed, she would have gotten inside the next morning to close her eyes and try to smell if he was still there: in cool whispers of hair gel, or a faint tang of cigarette smoke in the upholstery. She would have put her hands on the wheel just to feel the pull of sticky ice cream thumbprints.

She'd thought about it, and she still didn't know what she'd been trying to say with the kiss. That day at the wedding she'd been on overload, trying to comprehend that the next wedding she went to could have her parents at the altar. She hadn't been thinking about Jess at all and then he was there, actually there, not a bus ride away or in her dreams wearing a Chilton uniform with the sleeves rolled up, and she felt jittery and trapped in her own skin to be that close but still not be able to touch him, and she couldn't not do anything about that.

Then she got scared, because the way he kissed her back half a second later said _me too_ , and _please don't go_.

But she did go. She ran all the way to Washington for six weeks. And after that she kept running, back to Dean again and again when it seemed like that was the only option, because if Jess wanted to spend all his time kissing someone else three feet from where she ate breakfast every day, well then maybe she'd misinterpreted things.

But today he asked about Harvard. He asked so many questions but said about ten words, keeping everything at such a surface level that it was like talking to one of Grandma's DAR friends instead of someone who mattered to her on a daily basis-still mattered a lot, even though she'd tried to stay mad at him. And he kept asking and she kept affirming, every word out of her mouth another synonym for "I promise, nothing about me is different. It hasn't been that long."

Talking to him again was like coming up for air. It was something, but it wasn't quite enough. Until her pager beeped, she had forgotten about having to hug from up on her tiptoes and a hundred stolen page turns in the softball bleachers. Instead she wondered what it would feel like, getting close enough for droplets from his hair to land on her face. She was so tired of all the space between them that she wanted to scream.

All she knew was that she didn't want him leaving her alone and drenched, like helping her had been an embarrassing mistake.

"I'm gonna run home and change," Dean says now. "You wanna get a pizza or something, after?"

"Sure." He kisses her. The '50s studio audience in her head whoops right on cue.


End file.
